Description

In the third major installment of Electronic Arts'
Arcade racing series, there are several modes of play available. You have the standard race, with one big difference - now there are traffic cops out to ticket you for your excessive speed. Alternatively, you can take your turn with the radar gun and attempt to pull over speeding computer or human racers.

Returning to the flavour of the original Need for Speed, this adds a new Pursuit mode, where you must out run the cops through fast, open area tracks, while also out-lasting the rest of the pack. Another new mode is knockout, where you race through all the tracks, and whoever is last after each race is knocked out. The winner is, of course, the one that lasts the distance. Almost every course in the game has one or more shortcuts.

Forums

Trivia

Cars

Perhaps because Ferrari & Mercedes were concerned about their image, EA wasn't allowed to use their cars in the Hot Pursuit mode. However, there exists a patch/hack on the Internet that changes this and let's you escape the cops in all the Ferrari & Mercedes models.

Editor

The tool to create the cars in the game are actually included on the CD. This lead to a huge number of fan-created add-on cars, some with impossible performance levels. Four new cars, made by Electronic Arts, could be downloaded from the official website. These cars are: the Jaguar XKR, the Lister Storm, the Spectre R42 and the Ferrari 456M GT.

References

The Atlantica track has its own Electronic Arts office. If the cops follow in the proximity of that office you will, for example, hear them say: " Unit 15 in pursuit of a yellow Diablo near the EA building, he's doing more than 120!"

In the credits section of the options menu you can view a (phony) driver's license with picture and personal info for each of the developers. There are also some 360 degree panorama shots showing several groups of developers.

Statistics

When you turn on the Best Line option in the driving assist menu, two lines of traffic cones appear, indicating the optimal driving path. During a race the game will not only keep track of the percentage of time you spend between those two lines, but also the number of traffic cones hit.